Reasoning

[Alex Tucker]

Hi Jeni,

I mentioned that Kendall Clark had told me of a javascript based
tableaux reasoner the other day, which I thought might be good for
doing some client side OWL reasoning, but if this [1] is the one he
was talking about, it won't be particularly useful without a large
amount of hacking.

Another thing to look at is jOWL [2], a jQuery plugin primarily for
visualizing OWL ontologies, but it also reasons over ontologies and
lets you query using SPARQL-DL (the -DL bit being some simple
extensions to SPARQL which take into account any inferences which can
be made). Without delving too far into the code, I don't know whether
jOWL is really fully OWL-DL compliant, but it certainly seems to be
covering some of the same use cases you presented in your talk.

As far as I can remember, you also talked about maybe using some
server side library for this kind of heavy lifting. I ended up doing
a similar thing in a project last year, using Jena and Pellet on the
server and using json-rpc to communicate with a Javascript client,
which worked well enough. An alternative would be to use SPARQL-DL to
communicate, although you still have to get the triples to the server
somehow.

Finally, the other thing that springs to mind is just doing some kind
of translation of an RDF/XML ontology into the sorts of rule you
showed encapsulated as Javascript objects in your demo, so that at
least you can externalize those rules in a more standard ontology
language. If I get a moment, I'll have a look at this...

Cheers,
Alex.

[1] http://www.umsu.de/logik/trees/
[2] http://jowl.ontologyonline.org/